Jamdo Marketing Blog

For many bloggers, Google Adsense is going to be one of the primary ways of monetising a blog - possibly the only way.

While Adsense is a great system and has been the entrepreneurial blogger’s best friend for a few years, it is still not a perfect system and can be improved with a little human help.

There are a couple of things that a blogger needs to be aware of with Adsense and needs to adjust for in order to maximise the profit potential of their blog.

Adsense Smart Pricing

Having low quality advertisers on your site (ie. in Adsense) can be a big problem for a blogger.

When a reader clicks on the Adsense ad of a bad site, there is a much higher chance that they will immediately hit the back button on their browser.

While this is not your fault, if it happens too often, the Adsense system may think that you are sending out junk traffic.

The way Adsense combats junk sites running contextual advertising is to “smart price” them. That means that for the site sending the junk traffic, the payout per click will be reduced.

That can obviously impact your earnings.

Beat Smart Pricing

Luckily Google offer a fairly easy remedy to this problem.

The “Competitive Ad Filter” in your Adsense account is your best friend in this situation. It allows you to block up to 200 advertisers from advertising on your Adsense blocks.

But how do you know who to block?

Luckily, many other people have experienced this problem. Many lists of low quality, low paying Adsense advertisers have been found and put on appropriate black lists by bloggers and site owners.

There’s a good list compiled by Mark Cook for example.

Just log into your Adsense account and go to Adsense Setup >> Competitive Ad Filter and copy and paste the above list. Hit save and you are good to go.

Now, you will want to try to keep that list up to date from time to time by adding to it yourself and finding other lists (they are regularly mentioned in discussions about Adsense on webmaster forums for example).

But doing this simple thing will stop most of your worries about this problem and also maximise your earnings from Adsense.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, smart pricing

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I think I have hit a happy middle ground with Adsense advertising on Jamdo, with the placement of the advertising blocks.

There has always been an ongoing debate in the blogosphere regarding Adsense advertising on blogs.

A lot of people shun any money making from blogs at all. They think that the readers should be placed first and should not be subjected to any advertising whatesover.

Some are a little more reasoned that the ad placement should not be prominent so as to not upset the regular readers. The problem with that of course is that putting Adsense advertising in less prominent positions like the bottom of the right hand column means that it is much less likely to be clicked on.

Yet other bloggers think it is the right of any author to make money from their blog and put advertising wherever they please, including annoying popups etc.

I like to think I have found a happy alternative on this blog.

If you are a regular reader of a blog, then the most likely entry page that you will come in on is the main index. As a blogger then, you may want to tone down the advertising placement for the main page - especially having a big block of adsense smack bang in the middle of the page.

However, a lot of people from search engines enter sites via one of the other pages. These people are generally not the core of your loyal readership. In my opinion then, I really have no problems placing fairly prominent advertising in their face - like an adsense block straight under the title of the post, which is what I am currently doing on this blog.

Now there are a few problems with this.

If you only offer a snippet of the story on your front page, then your regular readers have to click through also in which case they will also be subject to the prominent advertising.

On the other hand if you offer the full story on your front page for your regular readers, you may get duplicate content issues with the search engines as the same content appears on several pages of your blog (ie. the index page and the post page). This is just something I have decided to cop sweet.

Now, I don’t think there is really any right or wrong answer for how Adsense should be used on blogs - it is obviously up to the author.

But I like to think that here at Jamdo, I have reached an acceptable compromise.

Adsense Resources:

Images and Adsense - From the Horse’s Mouth
Positioning Your Adsense Ads - From ProBlogger
Best Adsense Placement for Highest CTR - Adsense Master Plan

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, advertising, blogging

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Choosing the wrong keywords will destroy your online marketing efforts. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but I can tell you from experience that spending weeks and months SEOing a page for the incorrect keywords can really take the wind out of your sails. So can dumping a bunch of cash on some PPC and not getting any sales conversions.

In fact, a few years ago, after SEOing a site  for the singular of a keyword and later discovering (by the complete and abject failure of that site) that the plural was where both the traffic and conversions were, I decided to make sure I always did my keyword research well.

But what makes a good keyword when you are trying to convert some type of affiliate offer?

There are several ways to judge a keyword, but it basically comes down to two main factors.

Traffic volume and conversion rate.

Traffic volume kind of speaks for itself. The more people searching for a specific keyword term, the more traffic you will get. Use a tool like Overture or the Wordtracker Tool to estimate traffic for certain keywords. ‘Nuff said.

But how do you know which keyword searches will translate into sales?

Basically, you need to seperate keywords into three categories:

• browse
• compare
• buy

For the purpose of this post, let’s use a few examples from the auto industry.

Browse Keywords

A browse keyword is a word that is searched for when the searcher doesn’t really know what they are looking for. “Cars” would be an example of a browse keyword and I guarantee that you would have a very hard time getting people to convert into sales or leads if what they typed into Google was “cars”.

Browse keywords are the enemy of the affiliate marketer. We need to get more specific than that.

Compare Keywords

Compare keywords are words and phrases that people type into search engines, usually when they are researching a specific product that they are considering buying.

This can be a good time to get them, offer them the information that they desire and convert them into a sale via an affiliate program. Product comparison sites are good for this.

An example of a compare keyword within the auto industry would be “compare car insurance.” In fact, if you could rank well for that term naturally, your site would be doing very well.

Buy Keywords

Buy keywords are words and phrases that a searcher will type into search engines at the very end of the buying cycle. At this point the searcher knows exactly what they want and will be very specific in their search.

An example in the auto industry would be something like “cheap 1999 Toyota Landcruiser roof rack.”

Note that the keyword is very specific. If you can put exactly what the searcher is looking for infront of their face at this point, then you will have a very good chance of making a sales conversion.

Free Tip: Branded products with model numbers are great keywords and convert very highly.

Show me the money!

The problem of course is that most “buy keywords” with high traffic are very competitive to rank for with PPC and natural SEO.

For an affiliate or a blogger on a limited budget, your easiest course of attack will be to go after the long tail “buy keywords” and going after lots of them. “Compare keywords” also offer a lot of opportunities. Just be sure to track which keywords are turning into conversions (there’s great tutorial on using PHP for conversion tracking at Jeremy Palmer’s blog).

But whatever you do, don’t neglect the keyword research stage of your site building or PPC efforts.

Technorati Tags: seo, ppc, affiliate marketing, keywords

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I received an email in my inbox this morning from Keith Baxter, the owner of ModernClick - an affiliate network.

Keith was also the owner of Give PPC the Finger which was part of a very clever viral campaign to help him launch ModernClick.

I usually enjoy hearing what Keith has to say and so this morning when he recommended a new blog, I thought it was certainly worth a look.

Imagine my surprise when the fourth post I read on the blog was about how to use junk popup traffic to stuff cookies.

Now, I have bloggged before about cookie stuffing and given a few reasons why the affiliate industry should not be allowing it and how cookie stuffing is akin to stealing from merchants.

As an affiliate program manager I would certainly never sign with a network that accepted, let alone encouraged cookie stuffing.

I am not trying to be Mr. Holier Than Thou here - I have tried black and grey hat techniques to learn about SEO for example, but cookie stuffing is on a whole other level - it is stealing.

I can only hope that Keith was not aware of that post on the blog, because I think he has done himself a disservice by associating himself and Modernclick with it.

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Newsflash - the internet is borderless!

This little gem of wisdom seems to sail over the heads of many affiliate marketers and affiliate managers who insist that their affiliates be from a particular country.

To put it bluntly, that is moronic.

An affiliate in the UK is just as capable of driving Australian traffic to Australian websites as any Australian affiliate, for example.

I own sites that get predominantly Canadian traffic! Most of my sites have predominantly US traffic.

I therefore find it very frustrating to be excluded from program based on my geographical location.

I find it doubly frustrating that the folks at Azoogle don’t realise (or care) that some affiliates cannot see the landing pages of the offers they are promoting, because Azoogle will only show you the landing page via your own affiliate link. If the program is only paying out on US traffic (which is fair enough) then any affiliate in another country will be redirected to the site of another international offer.

How are you supposed to promote an affiliate program when you can’t even see the Merchant’s site? (CPA Empire fixed this problem about a month back).

Well, here’s a tip. Use a proxy IP.

Just go over to The Cloaker and type any URL (or affiliate link) into their tool and you will now be surfing via a US proxy. That means that when you go to a website, you will register as a US visitor on their stats and it also works to be able to see landing pages of US only affiliate programs in Azoogle (and any other antiquated affiliate system).

A whole new world of offers opens up!

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I was listening to Jeremy Shoemaker’s (aka Shoemoney) podcast today and a guy called in and asked why his traffic wasn’t converting into leads.

He was getting 2000 uniques per day and about 50 click-thoughs but no leads.

This peaked my interest for a moment, but when he explained it further the problem was fairly obvious.

He had music news site - Breaking Music News - a pretty nice site with some decent information. It has a nice design and no obvious problems.

To help with his click through rate, he had decided to show his own links that were made to look similar to Google Adsense links - an idea I have seen used before with varying success (he may have changed this by now). The “Google Ads” actually then pointed to affiliate offers.

And there was the problem. His affiliate offers had to do with ringtones (which happens to be Shoemoney’s specialty).

Ringtones don’t have much to do with the content of the Breaking Music News site. Very few people will visit a music news site with the intent of finding a ringtone. It is therefore very difficult to presell them on the idea of downloading a ringtone - even if it’s free.

Offering visitors something that they are already looking for when they arrive at your site is the key to getting higher conversions. If the visitor comes to your site after searching on Google for “ringtone download” they are going to be much easier to convert into a ringtone lead.

For the Breaking Music News site, however, he would probably have much greater success by finding offers related to.. well.. breaking music news. Off the top of my head, music downloads, music video downloads, music magazine offers would pobably be a good start. I think I also remember seeing a free 500 songs download on either CPA Empire or AzoogleAds (both aff. links) recently too, which would probably produce better results for him.

Horses for courses.

Find out how and why people are coming to your site and then give them what they want.

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